More on Terrence Howard's departure from Iron Man 2

Marvel has been gaining some notoriety as of late with its insistence to not offer their stars what they're worth. Obviously this was most notable in the case of Jon Favreau and resigning him for Iron Man 2. Recently however, news got out that Don Cheadle would be replacing Terrence Howard as Jim Rhodes in the sequel and I'm sure everyone (I know I did) thought it was because Marvel didn't want to pay him what he was worth. But was that really the case? A recent article by Entertainment Weekly says not so fast. Way back when Iron Man was first being conceived as a major motion picture, Howard was the first to be approached to do the film. Prior to the film's mammoth success, Howard was the biggest actor in the film and was paid as such. That's right, Marvel paid him more than Robert Downey, Jr., Jeff Bridges and Gwyneth Paltrow. Of course the film came along faster and better than expected, but it was too late to renegotiate Howard's contract. So there's that. Another component of the story is that Howard was supposedly a dick on set. Favreau was upset because many of his scenes had to be reshot and as a result, Favreau was steadily minimizing the role of War Machine in the sequel because he knew it would be Howard playing the character. Now Marvel knows that fans want War Machine in the sequel, meaning that they knew they needed to deal with this situation post-haste. Marvel approached Howard with a new contract for up to 80% less than his original contract which of course caused Howard's agents to balk. And then talks fell apart. Marvel hasn't officially said they were unhappy with Howard's performance, and Howard has simply said through his publicist that he had a great time filming the first movie. Its not really that we have to wait for anything to get cleared up, or that production of the sequel is in limbo. But it would be nice to have some resolution to this matter. Guess we'll see how the rest of this plays out. REAL reason for Don Cheadle replacing Terrence Howard?